Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Three poems by John T. Trigonis

John T. Trigonis

no. 9 / d.enck
no. 9 / d.
enck

Footprints

You can never be truly naked with
all that ink etched into your
epidermis, living off and loving every
once-clean inch of you.
Footprints clawed into ivory sand-skin,
silverfish constellations screeching
against chalkboard skies.
Messages bottled in between every
already dead shimmer and sigh,
whiskey aged and St. John bathed in
an afterbirth of broken doors leading to
transcendence.
If only my words could learn to live off
the indigo wilderness of your flesh, yes,
these same wanderers I whittle and scratch
onto sandless shores in your absence,
then might you once again be
truly naked with me at your side,
even amid all your needless ink ––
and mine –– that we try so desperately
to make sparkle and shine.

Silver

“I like the silver in your hair,” she said.
And then she showed me just how much.

Night slips itself into the next morning.
A leprechaun makes a lousy alibi.

We tell ourselves fictions because the nons
are too real for morning television.

Netflix in the backseat of an’89 Mustang,
top down in the dead silent primordial––

“Shhh!” she says and takes my hand. And
that’s how you know the birds sing

just for you.

Burnt Lentil Soup

My apartment still smells like burnt lentil soup since
the night you vinegared good-bye into my

sleep-salted ear. I peppered the mine fields
of my kitchen, seasoned to taste,

but those torched pulses tangled my nose hairs
into knots. Your gorgon’s gaze statued me Gordian

in my slippers, ancient blackened legumes
branded at the bottom of an old pot my dad carried

over from communist Greece. The following
night lost its appetite the moment I lost my

supper companion, walls still sticky with our morning
after love affairs and all my oils your

boiling water couldn’t boil away completely.

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

John T. Trigonis

Storymaker, crowdfunding “Zen Master,” and former freelance professor, John T. Trigonis has been and always will be a poet above all other titles. He’s the author of a plethora of chapbooks including his “Warehouse City” trilogy (BLUE, NOIR, and BROKENDOWN US), has had his verse featured in dozens of print journals and websites, and has been raised right on coffee, comics, and red wine.

Author: John T. Trigonis Tags: poetry Category: Poetry March 10, 2017

You might also like:

St. Huncke / credit: de
St. Huncke
Padden mist / credit: em
Two poems by Faizan Syed
Poems by Marcia Arrieta
the root / image credit: dre
3 Poems by Hawa Allan

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures